The Sunny Days Are Over
by LoveFromShinola
Summary: Cersei muses on her parents and her brother, and that one decision that destroyed their lives forever.


**AN:**

**My contribution to Cersei Lannister Week over at Why We Love the Lannisters on Tumblr. Yes, it does have an awful lot of Joanna and Tywin, but it's Cersei that's the POV character. So there!**

Cersei Lannister was nine when her Lady Mother died. Nine isn't so young to be unaware, a fact for which Cersei was at times thankful, at other times not so.

She liked to remember her mother. To recall her with fondness, to have that ability, was one more thing she could do that her so-called brother could not.

Joanna Lannister had been blessed with perfect Lannister features. Deep blonde hair, much like Cersei's own, that brightened to pale gold in the light of the sun or the flicker of a candle. Bright, attentive green eyes, shot through with a myriad of emotions. She always wore the most beautiful gowns, silks and velvets of varying colours, but never without a spot of gold or red. Always that Lannister pride.

It was at times of particular weakness – weakness she kept tightly to herself – that she recalled her Lady Mother most vividly. For though her appearance, though her physicality, was important, it was the traits of her character that Cersei prided.

She saw in her mother the true lioness she was ever wishing to be.

Joanna Lannister had been formidably intelligent, fierce and brave. To the outside world, to all non-Lannisters, she had seemed unapproachable, cold even. Yet, if they had had the courage to give her the time of day, they would have uncovered a person far different than she first appeared. Though Lady Joanna, like her Lord Husband, cultivated a stern reputation, she was also the light of their rooms. She was charitable to those who deserved charity, ever sweet to any child with whom she spoke. She tried hard to be understanding and sympathetic of the plights of the poor, and knew the names of many a wandering server at Casterly Rock.

In other words, though she was every inch the lioness, Joanna Lannister's position was so secure, she felt capable to be as kind and giving as she was shrewd and cunning.

Cersei hoped that if she had ever felt secure at the side of Robert Baratheon, she could have been loved, like her Lady Mother was at The Rock.

And that was what it came down to, as with most things in the life of Cersei Lannister – her father.

Her father is cruel, calculating, uncaring and unceasingly cold. _Is_. What he _was_ was so much different, and yet very much the same. When her Lady Mother had lived, Lord Tywin had been all those things. He had murdered countless men, he had led ravaging armies and cooked up fiendish plots. Yet still, within him, he had retained that capacity for human kindness, and exhibited it often, with those he trusted.

Trust, sadly, was a trait Tywin Lannister had lost, when he lost the only person whose trust he fully believed in.

Lord Tywin had never been governed by Lady Joanna, just as Lady Joanna had never been governed by Lord Tywin. Their absolute equality had allowed both of them their freedoms. Their absolute trust in one another had left no room for argument. Whatever Lord Tywin saw fit to do, he would do – but he would ensure first that his most trusted advisor agreed. Which she did. Because in those days, whilst Lord Tywin had been known for his ruthless streak, it had been tempered by his wife's reason, which made him remember his own.

When Lady Joanna had died, it was true; the best of Lord Tywin had died too. He could be ruthless, strategizing and plotting and all of it never less sharp than before – none of his intelligence was gone. But without Joanna to remind him of his reason, of his compassion and his lighter side, now hidden behind decades of black, his ruthless deeds proved to often be ruthless beyond imagining. Beyond reason.

The world before her Lady Mother's death seemed to Cersei to be a distant, dream-like place, filled with her mother's laughter, her father's secret smiles, their heads bent together as they talked over some grand scheme. And always time for she and Jaime.

All that relative calm had been lost in the storm that brought Tyrion to them, Tyrion the great laughing-stock, and took away their reason – took away her Lady Mother.

Yes, Cersei thought Tyrion was an embarrassment. She looked at his stunted legs and little arms and his fat barrel of a body and cringed with hatred. But there were moments, fleeting moments, when some particular occasion made her remember her Lady Mother, that she wondered what life might have been like, if the Lady Joanna had survived.

Cersei had learnt revulsion for Tyrion because of her Lady Mother's death, and because that death inspired her own father's hatred too – and father's opinion was one that Cersei, in those sunny days, had always had and held dear. What then, if Lady Joanna had survived? Would her perfect, regal, proud Lady Mother have borne the sight of her deformed offspring?

Cersei knew now, something that she had not as a child. Some secret that had been told to her by Grand Maester Pycelle – her mother had not meant to carry Tyrion. Yet another of the cruel ironies of life. She had missed her moon tea, and so he came, Cersei's lecherous imp of a so-called brother, half-formed and misshapen and damning her days forever.

Joanna Lannister had been told she must not bear another child. But, though the comparison in this case stung, it seemed that Cersei was more like her Lady Mother than she realised. No child by the man she loved would be torn from her, not in an unnatural way before its time. For the first time, Joanna Lannister had defied her Lord Husband, and refused to rid herself of Tyrion.

She had been the first and one of the only people to _want_ Tyrion Lannister.

And thus brought about the end of those sunny days, once and for all.

Pycelle had told her that relations were cold between her mother and father for some time after Tyrion's conception, though how that old fool knew just by spying her Lord Father turning a corner at The Keep she did not know – but she liked to believe it, at any rate.

She liked to believe that her Lord Father had been terrified, because terror and Tywin Lannister in the same thought was a revelation that shook her. She had seen and known the love her parents' shared. Would not her Lady Mother's adamant ways have turned her Lord Father to despair? A quiet, invisible despair, but a despair nonetheless. She knew losing her had driven him to an irretrievable point – could the _thought _of losing her have had the same effect?

This brooding on her Lady Mother, on her Lord Father, on her non-brother, would always bring about remembrance of that day, aged nine, when Joanna Lannister was lost forever. No more stories in the night, no more soft humming in the morning, no more braiding of her hair. No one to call her 'little love' like Mother always had.

But it was never Joanna's pale, still form she remembered from that day. Nor was it the shuddering tears of Jaime, or the ignored wails of Tyrion from some yonder room at The Rock. It was always her father, the father she had lost that day and never found again.

Gone was the father who would come to her chamber to speak with her, gingerly holding her toys. Gone was the father who would lift her in his arms and plant a firm kiss on her cheek. Gone was the father who would call her the prettiest little golden lady in all the Seven Kingdoms.

On that day, that day that brought forth Tyrion, she effectively became an orphan. Her Lady Mother dead, and her Lord Father, haunted. Sure and certain that it was his fault, that he could have stopped it, should have stopped it. All that she had seen in his eyes, even at nine, before it faded. And when it did, her Lord Father was as hollow and lifeless as her Lady Mother.

On that day, her Mother and Father both perished.

Mother gone. Father gone. All for the sake of Tyrion. And those sunny days were well and truly gone, forever.


End file.
